Acceptance rate

Acceptance rate is the first conversion in a LinkedIn outreach funnel. You send a connection request, and the person either accepts, ignores it, or declines. The rate is accepted requests divided by requests sent, usually tracked per week or per batch.

It matters because everything downstream depends on it. You can only message people who accepted, so a weak acceptance rate shrinks every later number. It is also a health signal: a rate that keeps falling can mean your list is off-target, your profile looks thin, or you are sending faster than the account can support.

In practice, teams watch acceptance rate by audience and by note style, change one thing at a time, and compare against their own baseline rather than someone else's benchmark. Count only requests that actually went out, not ones that were queued or blocked.